This is the fourth video in my Sustainability Customer Reference series project. The project involves my talking to SAP customers and asking them about the sustainability solutions they have implemented. In this video, I talk to Dr Hubert Norz of global specialty chemicals firm Sika about how they use SAP solutions to stay compliant with safety regulations, like the European REACH directive.

Here’s the transcription of our conversation:

Tom Raftery: Hi everyone, welcome to the GreenMonk Sustainability Customer Reference Series sponsored by SAP. With me I have Dr. Hubert Norz from Sika.

Dr. Norz can you tell me a little bit about Sika as an organization and then your role within Sika?

Hubert Norz: Okay, Sika is one of the global players in the area of specialty chemicals. We are in the construction market and in the industry. For construction market we produce mortars, admixtures, sealants, adhesives, flooring products, and products for roofing and roofing systems for example to fix solar panels in roofs.

Tom Raftery: Okay and your role within Sika?

Hubert Norz: I am responsible for product stewardship within the Sika group and I have second role in the company of Sika Germany, I am responsible for the management systems that means environmental management, there’s some quality management, safety management and a very new initiative concerning sustainability that’s energy management.

Tom Raftery: So how does SAP help you with those jobs?

Hubert Norz: Sika uses SAP across the organization. And in my area product stewardship we use mainly SAP EHS. SAP EHS helps us to create safety data sheets to comply with transport rules for dangerous goods management. We produce our product labels out of the SAP system and we use SAP for the recycling of our packaging materials.

Tom Raftery: And what’s the requirement for using a system as complex as SAP for producing something like a label?

Hubert Norz: The labels contain all the safety information you need by law to be compliant and the information concerning specific aspects like CE marking, like recycling logos, we have more than 100 different certification and rule specific logos in the SAP system which will be put — right label for the right product.

Tom Raftery: So you mentioned recycling, how does SAP help you with that?

Hubert Norz: For example Sika has a huge variety of packagings and for each different fraction of different material, you have to pay a different amount for the recycling material. And SAP helps that using a real module to calculate different parts, the weight of the different parts, the cost for recycling for the different fractions, different materials to do the total calculation for the packaging recycling which is mandatory by law to do that.

Hubert Norz: If you ship products to your customers — there are very specific rules and you have to comply with that rules for safety on roads, safety in the air transportation. SAP provides the possibility to — or to provide the information for a customer and to create all kinds of reports on the delivery papers for orders of the products et cetera.

Tom Raftery: And how are you going to handle REACH legislation?

Hubert Norz: We use SAP EHS in a extended way to comply with the chemical legislation REACH in Europe. And we are on the way to enhance the SAP EHS system with SAP REACH compliance engine and hence the substance volume tracking module, which we are convinced — it’s the only thing in our area to enable us to fulfill these requirements.

Tom Raftery: So how are you finding the SAP services?

Hubert Norz: We are working since — so many years together with SAP, since the early 90s. And in my area SAP EHS, we appreciate very much the flexibility and the expertise of SAP. And in the past — the requirements we had SAP tried always very hard to fulfill and we were very satisfied.

Tom Raftery: So finally what are your plans for the SAP product set going forward?

Hubert Norz: After the rollout in many countries like Switzerland, Germany, Austria and North America, we’ll extend the new SAP template all over Europe. That means the next rollouts will be for our companies in UK, Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary, following by France and Italy. And all other European companies will follow soon.

Tom Raftery: Great, fantastic thanks a million for coming on the show.